In two decades, Vietnamese refugee women went from arriving with nothing to owning roughly 80 percent of the nail salons in Los Angeles. Here is how it happened — the licensing, the economics, the networks — and why that history still shapes how salons run today.
Walk into almost any American strip mall and you will find a nail salon. There is a good chance it is owned by a Vietnamese American family, and a better chance that the person at the front desk learned the trade from a relative or a friend who learned it from someone else in the same community. This is one of the most striking business stories in modern America, and it happened in roughly two decades.
The numbers from the mid-1990s make the point. By then, Vietnamese Americans owned about 30 percent of the roughly 22,000 nail salons in the United States. In Los Angeles, the figure was near 80 percent. And this was a community that made up about two tenths of one percent of the U.S. population and had barely begun arriving before 1975.
That history is worth understanding, and not only out of respect. The habits the industry was built on — commission pay, walk-in traffic, cash-tight startups, hiring through word of mouth, families working the floor together — are still the habits most salons run on today. If you own a salon, this is the story of the business you are in.
Vietnamese immigration to the United States effectively began with the end of the Vietnam War. The first wave arrived in 1975. A second followed in the late 1970s and through the 1980s, the group often described as the boat people. A third came through the Orderly Departure Program, which let Vietnamese immigrants reunite with family members already in the United States.
Unlike most immigrant groups studied by economists, these arrivals were not primarily economic migrants. They came as political and religious refugees, which shaped everything that followed: the capital they arrived with, the credentials they could use, the English they spoke, and the networks they had to rebuild from nothing.
Southern California — Los Angeles and Orange Counties in particular — became the center of gravity. It was already home to beauty schools, manufacturers, and distributors of nail products. Vietnamese refugees entered the Los Angeles manicure industry in the late 1970s, and the trade grew fast. Between 1984 and 1989, the number of licensed manicurists in Los Angeles County alone rose about 50 percent, from roughly 9,755 to 15,238. Vietnamese Americans accounted for something like 80 percent of them.
On paper, refugee women entering this business looked like they were missing every prerequisite: no investment capital, no U.S. credit history, no American business experience, limited English, and little familiarity with American customs. The work itself is hard — long hours, demanding customers, real competition, and the risk of robbery or failure.
So why this trade? The women interviewed in the research gave consistent answers, and they still describe the appeal of the business today:
There was another reason that comes through clearly in the interviews and that rarely makes it into business coverage: the salon offered a degree of insulation. Many of the women had tried other jobs — factory and garment work, in particular — where they felt at a disadvantage in every interaction with the public. Running a salon did not remove contact with an unfamiliar culture; salon owners talk to customers in English all day. But it put them in control of the terms of that contact. They set the schedule, the prices, and the shop.
About half of the women in the study had started out as seamstresses and learned about the manicure business from co-workers in garment shops. One former schoolteacher from Vietnam who arrived in 1986 and took a sewing job in a downtown Los Angeles sweatshop switched to manicuring a year later and ended up earning four to five times what she had made sewing — without bringing work home at night.
Licensing is the underrated part of this story. California requires a manicurist license. A full cosmetology course typically runs 1,600 hours. A manicuring license required only 350 hours of training at an accredited school, and applicants had to be at least 17 years old. Training ran roughly $1,200 to $1,500, and government-sponsored job training programs could cover tuition.
That gap — 350 hours instead of 1,600 — is the door the industry walked through. A specialized, affordable, short program meant a woman could be licensed and earning within months rather than a year or more.
The schools adapted to meet the demand. Cosmetology schools managed or directed by Vietnamese Americans opened and built programs around Vietnamese students with limited English, offering courses in Vietnamese and help with financial aid. At one school, Vietnamese students went from about 2 percent of enrollment to roughly 40 percent over ten years. The California State Board of Cosmetology began offering its licensing exam in Vietnamese, alongside English and Spanish.
Licensing rules still vary by state, and they still shape where and how fast the industry grows. Anyone opening a shop today should check their own state board's current hour requirements, exam languages, and sanitation rules rather than assume the California picture applies.
Then, as now, most manicurists worked on commission — commonly around 60 percent — plus tips. One industry estimate from the period put the average yearly income for a manicurist at roughly $20,000 to $24,000. For a woman who could save a few thousand dollars, buying or opening a shop was the way to move up.
Pricing tells its own story. In the early 1980s, a full set ran about $60. By the mid-1990s, most Vietnamese-owned salons charged $18 to $20 for the same service. Some shops offered the first service free to bring in new customers. Prices fell because the market got crowded and competitors opened close to one another, sometimes a few doors down the same street.
That compression created real friction. Some non-Vietnamese salon owners resented seeing prices cut to a third of what they had been a decade earlier. Vietnamese owners pointed out the obvious counterargument: the same price competition made nail care affordable to far more people, which is a large part of why the market grew at all. Both things were true. Many shops ended up only marginally profitable, and margin pressure has never really left this industry.
Here is the finding most worth sitting with. Low-cost and free technical assistance existed through public and private agencies. The owners in the study did not use it. Most were simply not aware that agencies existed that could help them set up a business. One woman who had been a professional manicurist since 1981 did know about the Small Business Administration and chose not to apply, because she wanted to prove she could do it alone. Another, who arrived in 1990, only learned about the programs years later and assumed by then that they were for more recently arrived refugees.
So the shops were financed with personal savings and money borrowed from family and friends. The women knew bank loans existed. They did not pursue them, for reasons that stack: limited English, a lack of trust in the process, and unfamiliarity with how any of it worked.
That gap between available help and used help is still worth naming, because it has not closed as much as you would hope. If you are opening or expanding a salon today, it is worth at least understanding what SBA-backed financing involves before deciding to self-fund by default. Our guide to SBA loans for small businesses covers the programs, who qualifies, and what lenders ask for.
The growth was carried by an informal ethnic network that worked better than most formal ones. Prospective students heard about financial aid and job training from relatives and friends. Owners who needed technicians found them by word of mouth or through students at nearby beauty schools. Salons advertised in Vietnamese-language newspapers and on Vietnamese radio and television, and help-wanted signs in Vietnamese were a common sight in the windows of Los Angeles nail salons.
The customer side looked different. Few Vietnamese or other Asian American customers frequented these salons. The shops opened in every kind of neighborhood — predominantly white, African American, Latino, and mixed — and the clientele generally reflected whoever lived or worked nearby. On one stretch of Westwood Boulevard in West Los Angeles, eight nail salons occupied five city blocks, six of them Vietnamese-owned or operated. Only restaurants and photocopy shops were more numerous on that half mile.
Saturation and price competition were the obvious problems. Two others come through just as strongly in the interviews, and both are still live issues in salons today.
Health and sanitation. Skin infections and exposure to chemicals are genuine occupational risks in this trade. Limited English made it harder for many technicians to read and fully understand warning labels on nail products — a safety problem created by a language barrier, not by carelessness. Most technicians in the study took precautions such as wearing masks against filing dust. Sanitation matters to customers too: clients want to know tools are properly sterilized, and every state sets standards manicurists must meet.
Customer friction. Disagreements over tipping were common. Unhappy customers sometimes asked for compensation. Technicians with limited English, or less familiarity with American customs, often found these demands overwhelming, and the feelings and language that came with them harder to absorb. Technicians who spoke better English and were more acculturated handled the same situations more easily — not because they cared more, but because they could read the customer and respond. That is a training and communication problem, and it is solvable.
For many of these women, the salon functioned as an extension of the family rather than a separate place they went to work. The business let them provide for family members and organize family resources in a way a regular job did not. Children came to the shop. One owner kept a corner of her salon set up as a small childcare area, with a doll house and toys, so her four-year-old could be with her during the day. Being able to look after a child while serving customers was, for several of the women, the single best thing about the work.
That is worth remembering whenever the nail industry gets written about as pure economics. For a lot of the people who built it, the flexibility was the point.
Thirty years on, a great deal has changed. The industry is far larger and far more visible. Sanitation regulation is tighter. Customers book online, pay by card or phone, and read reviews before they walk in. Second- and third-generation owners run shops their parents opened.
What has not changed is the shape of the business. Margins are thin because competition is close. Staff are paid on commission and tips, which makes payroll and tip handling the most sensitive part of running the shop. Walk-ins still drive the day, so turn order and fairness among technicians can make or break a team. Hiring still happens through community networks. And plenty of owners are still running the whole operation on paper, memory, and trust — the same way the first shops did, because it worked.
The original success of this industry came from doing more with less. That instinct is still right. But a few of the old constraints are no longer constraints, and it is worth knowing which ones:
The historical findings, figures, and interview material summarized in this article come from the research of Craig Trinh-Phat Huynh, then an M.A. candidate at the Asian American Studies Center, University of California, Los Angeles. His paper, Vietnamese-Owned Manicure Businesses in Los Angeles, was published in the volume Reframing the Immigration Debate (UCLA Asian American Studies Center Press). It draws on interviews with ten women manicurists working in Los Angeles County nail salons, conducted between March 1994 and September 1995. The women ranged in age from 24 to 55; three owned their salons and seven were employees.
Huynh's own conclusion is a careful one, and it holds up. If success is defined as making millions, Vietnamese manicurists could not be called successful. If success means survival and steady growth to the point where a person can earn a decent living by American standards, they largely were. Not every Vietnamese woman who entered the trade achieved that, and more research is needed. But the industry gave a great many refugee women a route to self-sufficiency in a country where their other employment options were limited by a language and education gap.
This article is Astra POS's own summary and interpretation of that research, written for salon owners. Figures cited are from the mid-1990s unless noted and are presented as historical context, not current market data. We encourage readers interested in the full study to seek out the original publication.
Astra POS is made for how these shops actually run — turn rotation, commission and tip splitting, walk-ins, and full Vietnamese-language support. Start free on a single location.